Hi folks, sorry if this is really obvious question to those in the know, but I'm a complete novice with this shoutcast malarkey...
We're running a small station playing on monday/tuesday evenings between 7pm & 10pm, it's a fairly traditional studio setup, the output of which is fed to Winamp running the shoutcast plugin. The problem that we have is that the connection to the server keeps dropping - fortunately the auto-reconnect feature in the plugin usually gets things up and running within a few seconds, but it's frustrating to say the least! This evening's show ran flawlessly up until around 9.15pm, after which the connection kept restarting. I don't know if this a problem with the shoutcast plugin, the streaming PC (granted it's a rather tired old laptop running XP!), our internet connection, or an issue at the server end. We have a 10mb connection, the upload speed of which is around 500k, and we are streaming in 56k mono mp3, which I wouldn't have thought would be putting much strain on it! I know things slow down at peak times, but surely not enough to mess up such a small upload? When I look at the server usage statistics, the bar never seems to be over 1%, so it seems unlikely that it's the server dropping us at that end. Would having more listeners affect the reliability of our connection?
Is it just a symptom of the fact that it's a free server? Would a premium hosting package solve these problems, or is it a problem closer to home? I'm all out of ideas, any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
Cheers,
John
